Dive Summary:

• Utility crews in parts of New Jersey are faced with a monumental cleanup effort, but much of the work doesn’t involve moving trees or broken electrical boxes, but rather the mundane task of wiping salty discharge away from electrical equipment.
• The discharge is the result of Hurricane Sandy’s blowing floodwater from nearby bodies of water all over equipment.
• About 67,000 utility workers are working on both these simple, repetitive tasks as well as the more familiar tasks of telephone pole replacement, stringing wire, and replacing blown transformers.

From the article:

For utility crews racing to restore power to residents of this waterfront city that have been sitting in the dark for a week, the task is both mundane and monumental: Clean a bunch of gunk off electrical equipment with rags and cleaning spray.

That's the way it has been across the Northeast, as crews clean, replace and fix the equipment needed to get the lights back on for millions of customers who lost power when Superstorm Sandy blew through. ...